Friday, November 13, 2015

My Journey As A Scroll Saw Pattern Designer #1653: Investing in Your Business

I have had my own business for over 20 years now. It began when I wanted to stay home and be with my son, yet still help contribute to the family income. Since I have always loved just about any type of crafting and creating, I felt that it was what I was destine to do – create and design.

I won’t tell you that I haven’t had my rough times. There were those who doubted my ability to be successful (and still do) as well as the time and economic restrictions that are required when maintaining a home-based business. There is no such thing as ‘overnight success’ as far as I am concerned. Every successful person that I meet is only 'successful’ because they were willing to work hard for practically nothing at some point and overcome the pitfalls and struggles that accompany being an entrepreneur. Shortcuts just don’t make it, and resiliency is a must.

Not every idea we have is a 'winner’ either. I can tell you from experience that there are probably just as many ideas that I had that 'failed’ as there are that were successes. But over the years I have learned not to allow the failures slow me down or deter me from forging ahead. Usually there are valuable lessons learned with each idea we have – whether it is a failure or a success. The way I look at it, if I learned something from an idea that maybe didn’t go over so well, it wasn’t really a failure at all. It was a valuable lesson that (hopefully) taught me to be a better business owner and make better choices in the future. These are necessary for our growth and I feel that it is truly important to remember that without taking some risk and venturing into new territories, it is very easy for a company to become stagnant in this ever-changing world of ours. We can’t be afraid to try new things.

Yesterday was an amazing day. Throughout the course of my daily routine, I got an idea. An epiphany, if you will. I realize something that may really help to expand our business and help it grow. It is not necessarily a 'new’ idea (or one that is new to a crafting industry) but it is as if the puzzle pieces just fell into place and while I have been aware of these things for quite a while, I haven’t really put the pieces together with our own business before in the way that I thought of yesterday. I must say I am excited.

The idea took some investing on my part, as things such as this often do. But the investment (and accompanying risk) is relatively small to the potential return that we will possibly realize. It is pretty cool when I think about it. And while no investment of this type is 'guaranteed’, it is such a small risk that it is certainly worth a shot. So I am going ahead with it.

I don’t mean to be mysterious about it but until things are more in place I am not going to share it with you. There are so many variables at this point that sharing would only be guessing and until I have a clearer picture of things myself, there is no need (or desire for that matter) to muddy things up at this point with speculation. I probably wouldn’t have mentioned it at all, but it occupied much of my thought process yesterday and I awoke early this morning because my head was spinning with ideas. So I am hopeful and excited that this will be something wonderful for all of us.

I suppose the point that I wanted to make in today’s post is that you shouldn’t be afraid as a business owner to invest in yourself. Yes – sometimes there are risks involved. Sometimes things don’t work out like you plan. But if you don’t have enough faith in yourself to follow through with your ideas, perhaps you should focus on doing another job. For if you don’t believe in your products or yourself, how can you expect your customers to do so? It really is that simple.

So that is all I will say about it for now. I promise to keep you posted as to the progress of these new ideas. But just as I do, you need to wait until they are ready to be presented. I believe they will be worth the wait.

For today, I wanted to also introduce a new pattern plaque set that Keith finished up and put on the site yesterday:

He created this beautiful SLDK627 - Christmas Carol Word Art Pattern Set #1 for you to scroll saw. As with all his pattern sets of this nature, each plaque pattern is available individually as well as at the discounted set price. We hope you like it. :)

Today is a rainy and dull Friday morning. The sun has come up, but it is still not even that light outside. I don’t really mind though, as I will be spending the day drawing and hopefully cutting some things out for orders. I have quite a few things to go out on Monday and I also want to cut some of my new ornaments out as well.